"Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man is Hard to Find' and G.K. Chesterton's Manalive."
The entire essay is not available as part of the preview, but most of it is, and what is there is interesting. To give a couple excerpts:
The genesis of "A Good Man is Hard to Find" has been traced to various news items in the Atlanta Journal. The evidence for this origin is circumstantial, but enough particulars of congruence emerge to suggest that O'Connor might indeed have transformed in her story bits and pieces from various news accounts. Nevertheless, the most enigmatic moment in the story, The Misfit's conclusion that the grandmother "would have been a good woman...if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life," has no analog in the news accounts O'Connor read in the Atlanta Journal. It's origin appears to be Chesterton's Manalive [...]
[...] the true merit of discovering Chesterton's influence on O'Connor's story lies in a recognition of how "A Good Man is Hard to Find" apparently revises Manalive. O'Connor's short story does not merely derivatively reuse an episode in Chesterton's novel, but (as one would expect of a work by a major author like O'Connor) it thoroughly recasts this episode. O'Connor's world is patently darker than Chesterton's.
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